04/07/2015

Pinterest for Blogging | 11 ways to pin like a pro

Pinterest for Blogging | 11 ways to pin like a pro

On Monday I attended a fantastic workshop held by Pinterest which provided an in depth view of how bloggers and website owners can harness the full power of Pinterest. There was lots of insight into effective strategies through which you can establish yourself as an influential pinner and drive traffic to your blog.

In this post I’m going to share my top takeaways from the day.

Before we get started, here’s why you should make sure your posts are ready to discover on Pinterest:

  • There are 70m+ monthly users*
  • The UK is the largest customer base after the US*
  • One third of millennials are on Pinterest*

*Data provided by Pinterest

This provides a vast and diverse audience that will likely extend beyond whom you connect with when you promote your posts on social media.

So let’s get straight to it, with 11 ways to up your game and pin like a pro!

1. Curate beautiful boards.

If you want to grow your presence remember that you need to give people a reason to follow your board. Take time and care to curate visually appealing and content rich pins on boards that will appeal to your intended audience. Make sure that the cover photo for each board is a great representation of the overall board’s content to encourage people to click through and browse the whole board.
Arrange your boards so that they are asthetically appealing too. As you can see from my boards, I’ve arranged them so that colour tones work well together and create a distinctive look and feel.

Pinterest for Blogging | 10 easy ways to up your game and become a pinning pro
Boards with complimentary themes are arranged together to encourage followers to move from one board to the next.

Pinterest for Blogging | 10 easy ways to up your game and become a pinning pro

2. Optimise your Board Names and Descriptions to Enable Discovery

Give the board a name which is simple, clear and specific and include a description rich in keywords to make it search friendly. Think about what you’d type into a search box if you were looking for your board.

Pinterest for Blogging | 10 ways to up your game and become a pinning pro
(This picture illustrates a good board description.. but the pin descriptions still need some work!)

3. Make sure your pins are helpful and lead to information.

Check links before you repin content to ensure that the links work.

Always make sure that pins that you create contain the source link of the picture that you’re posting. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding that the picture doesn’t lead you to the information you were looking for.

4. Don’t just post your own content, share what inspires and interests you.

It’s great to use Pinterest as a tool to drive traffic to your blog or website, but always remember your audience. People love variety and value opinions, so by sharing what inspires and interests you too, you become someone to turn to for the latest trends and information.

Plus when you share other people’s work, you are drawn to their attention and they might just do the same for you!

5. Integrate your own work onto boards where you share pins from a variety of sources.

It’s a good idea to have a board specifically for your own collection of work so that people can browse through your whole archive in one place if they want to.

However if you write a great recipe post, share it on one of your food boards too. It’ll be easier to find in search results than your generic board and your work will be seen in the company of other experts in that field, encouraging the viewpoint that you are one too.

6. Pin consistently, but don’t spam.

As your follower count grows, people will look to you as a source of great, consistent content. Don’t flood their homepage with 40 pins on one day, then go quiet for a week, then have another major pinning session. Pin regularly and consistently with varied content to keep your followers engaged.

7. #Dontbother – make your pins and boards content rich

This advice is direct from Pinterest so please trust me on this one!
Despite what you may have read, don’t bother with hashtags! The average Pinterest user will not use hashtags in searches and using normal keywords is just as effective in search results.
Focus on providing helpful, informative descriptions instead containing the keywords in a natural way. This creates personality and authenticity. 
Instead of this:

#Super #healthy #avocado #lunch #fruit #lunchtime #fruity #superfood #superfoods #healthyeating

Try this:

I love this healthy fruit salad which contains my favourite superfood avocado. Not only is it a delicious and filling lunch, but also quick and easy to make and packed full of nutrients to give you extra energy.

Isn’t that more enjoyable to read?
Here’s my Home and Living Style board to give you some more examples.

8. Focus on quality search descriptions, not followers.

Did you know that the main source of traffic to your pins is the search facility on Pinterest? Optimise your board and pin descriptions for searches and stop worrying about how many followers you have. Pinterest themselves were eager to confirm that a follow count really isn’t that important!

9. Install Rich Pins

Rich Pins scrape the meta data from your blog post to create an extra description which is automatically added to your pins. It gives your pins a professional appearance and also ensures that the origin of the pin is clearly credited. People are more likely to click through on a Rich Pin link too, so it’s well worth the time taken to set it up.
This post from HelloBrio tells you how to set up Rich Pins for Blogger and contains a link for WordPress users too!
hellobrio.com/rich-pins-tutorial-blogger
And here’s my recent article explaining what meta data is and how you can add it to your blog posts:
lovedbylaura.com/blogger-stepbysstep.html
This is what an Article Rich Pin looks like. As you can see it’s got an extra section with my post title and description:

Pinterest for Blogging | 10 ways to up your game and become a pinning pro

10. Convert your account to ‘Pinterest for Business’.


By converting your account to the business version you gain access to Pinterest Analytics. It only takes a minute to do and after 48 hours you’ll have access to some seriously insightful data on who is viewing your pins, what boards are the most popular and where your traffic is coming from.

Go to https://www.pinterest.com/business/getstarted/ to get started.

11. Optimise your blog for mobile devices.

80% of Pinterest usage is on a mobile device, so to avoid a really high bounce rate make sure that your website is optimised for mobile usage.

I really hope you enjoyed today’s post and found it helpful! If so please do take the time to share it – there are Pinterest ‘pin it’ hover buttons on all of my pictures.

Also if you are interested in hearing more from the Pinterest workshop or have any questions please let me know in the comments or on Twitter, I’m @lovedbylaurac …and of course you can find me on Pinterest at pinterest.com/lovedbylaura/!
Finally a massive thanks to Lizzie from Pinterest’s UK team for running the workshop.

I’ve been shortlisted in the Bloggers Blog Awards!

Please vote for me as the Best Up & Coming Lifestyle Blog by clicking here to visit the voting page.

Lifestyle & vegan food blogger
Peterborough | UK
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